SmartMobs is about the networking of people that has been made possible by the new era of connectivity. In the spirit of the history of Thanksgiving, this post is a tip of the tall pilgrim hat to the mobbing of ancestries online.

An extensive, mature example of the networking of ancestries online is the material available on the descendants of the original Mayflower Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620.

MayflowerFamilies.com is a major website for the Mayflower early families and their descendants — who must by now number in the thousands. Governor Bradford kept his own accounting of the core network formed by the passengers on the first trip of the Mayflower to Plymouth. Bradford wrote 30 years later of an expanding Mayflower mob:

Of these 100 persons which came first over, in this first ship together; the greater halfe dyed in the generall mortality; and most of them in .2. or three monthes time. And for those which survied though some were ancient & past procreation; & others left ye place and cuntrie. yet of those few remaining are sprunge up above .160. persons; in this .30. years. And are now living in this presente year . 1650. beside many of their children which are dead and come not within this account.

The pages of MayflowerFamiles.com, and many other websites, record in great detail the network of descendants from these earliest pilgrims. The first small mob who survived the winter of 1620-1621 celebrated the First Thanksgiving the following fall, along with the native Americans who helped them provide the harvest feast.

Happy Thanksgiving ye one and all.

The UK government recently unveiled the Digital Economy Bill, which has prompted Alan Moore to engage in a retrospective regarding 20th Century [old school] politicians, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law.  Moore’s thoughts inspire reflection on how networked [digital] economics is fundamentally different to the “straight lines of a mass media culture” and analogue business models.   I encourage you to read the following: Mandleson, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore and participate in the ensuing debate.

“And why is this becoming such an important debate? Because, the motivation is ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations, argues Robert McChesney. In an age of information technology, control of our culture becomes a critical battleground. The arcane ins and outs of today’s copyright battles now mask a much deeper cultural struggle in which the stakes have grown unthinkably high.” - Alan Moore

A FT.com article titled “Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact” describes early discussions of “the media company being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google.” This one will be fascinating to watch because it would be the software titan (Microsoft) attempting to dethrone the network gorilla (Google) by ripping away a hunk of the gorilla’s emergent network and trying to grow the hunk within in the titan’s separate network garden.

Here is some flavor from the article, which is about the business side, and not mentioning the network laws which will powerfully affect what happens:

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.

I have persuaded Jim Fishkin to put the introductory chapter of his important new book, “When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy & Public Consultation” online. For those who think that the idea of improving the publish sphere by putting together citizens with varying political views in the presence of solid information and polling methodology is crazy idealism, Fishkin offers a wealth of empirical evidence from years of methodologically controlled experimentation with “deliberative polling” — including China, the European Parliament, and groups all over the USA and the world. His most radical idea — that Americans should have a day off before the elections for “deliberation day,” is, in my opinion, the single most empirically solid and hopeful proposal for improving the often sub-standard level of political discourse among citizens.

Conventional polling (3A) uses a randomly selected microcosm to show what (usually) nondeliberative public opinion is like for the whole society. Deliberative Polling (3B) uses a randomly selected microcosm to show what more deliberative public opinion would be like for the whole society. And in the case of 4B the idea is to actually bring it about when it would matter most—in the context of an election. How could such a counterfactual possibility be realized

Our proposal is simple but expensive. We call it “Deliberation Day.”[ The problem for the Deliberative Poll was to motivate a microcosm of the entire population to overcome the incentives for rational ignorance and to engage in enough substantive face to face discussion to arrive at informed judgments—informed about the issues and the main competing arguments about them that other citizens would offer. But it is one thing to imagine doing this for a microcosm; quite another to imagine doing it for the entire population. Gallup’s vision of the mass media turning the entire country into one great room foundered, as we saw earlier, on the lack of a social context that would encourage small group deliberation. If everyone is in “one great room” in the large scale nation state, the room is so big that no one is listening. A different, more decentralized strategy is required.

Our idea is simply to have a national holiday in which all voters would be invited to participate in local, randomly assigned discussion groups as a preparation to the voting process a week later. Candidates for the major parties would make presentations transmitted by national media and local small group discussions would identify key questions that would be directed to local party representatives in relatively small scale town meetings held simultaneously all over the country. A key point is that incentives would be paid for each citizen to participate in this full day’s work of citizenship. The cost ($150 per person), while significant, would make democracy far more meaningful as it would provide for an input from the public that involved most people and that also led to a large mass of citizens becoming informed on the issues and the competing arguments. As shown by Deliberative Polls, some of which are as short as one day, even one day’s serious discussion can have a dramatic effect on ordinary citizens becoming more informed and changing their preferences in significant ways.

A MacArthur Foundation article titled Selling Museums to a Tough Audience: Teens describes a meeting where 23 leading museum people commiserated about the rejection of museums by the youth:

Even though this group was hardly the ostriches, they all grappled with the constraints of the current system—from physical structures to limited budgets. What happens to intellectual copyrights? How do you digitize three-dimensional objects? And who’s the boss here? Do we really want 14-year-olds telling us what to exhibit and how?

Lurking behind many of these questions is an issue that crops up a lot in this digital world—who is the expert, who is the editor, who is the curator? How much democracy do we really want?

“Some say, ‘no, we need curators,’” says Elizabeth Babcock, vice president of education and library collections at Chicago’s Field Museum. “Others say, ‘no, that’s what’s wrong with curating. It presumes to know what is interesting. They’re delivering what they think people want.’”

This latter approach, says Michael Edson, director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian, risks making museums obsolete. Millennials—those born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s—recently told a focus group that the Smithsonian “is not an institution that understands me.”

This generation demands a lot more. It’s no longer about the Smithsonian saying, “We’re great. Come and love us,” says Edson. Instead, museums must come to terms with opening up their collections for wider access and creating more citizen curators. . . .

The article continues by describing some curating projects integrating the digital world. These projects were demonstrated when teens entered the meeting. This connecting as curating was called “cool” by some teens who participated in the demos.

A New York Times Technology report today titled Library in a Pocket takes a look at the how smartphones are being used to read books. This trend is so strong that one out of every five new iPhone apps released last month was a book. From the article:

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”

Over the last eight months, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a range of smaller companies have released book-reading software for the iPhone and other mobile devices. One out of every five new applications introduced for the iPhone last month was a book, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends.

I’ve been interested in the public sphere for a long time, and I’m increasingly concerned about the amount of misinformation, disinformation, sloganeering, and brutal polarization among citizens. I grew interested in Jim Fishkin’s work long before I started teaching in the Communication Department at Stanford (Fishkin is dept chair). Fishkin’s book, When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, is being released this month by Oxford University Press. This is not just theory and not just solid empirical study, but a practical demonstration that it is possible for citizens to come together and actually deliberate about the kinds of issues we need to grapple with if we are to remain citizens of free societies, capable of some degree of self-governance.

All over the world, democratic reforms have brought power to the people, but under conditions where the people have little opportunity to think about the power that they exercise. In this book, James Fishkin combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice and shows how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive our modern democracies. The book outlines deliberative democracy projects conducted by the author with various collaborators in the United States, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The book is accompanied by a DVD of “Europe in One Room” by Emmy Award-winning documentary makers Paladin Invision. The film recounts one of the most challenging deliberative democracy efforts with a scientific sample from 27 countries speaking 21 languages.

Last week Howard Rheingold was in New York City to participate in The Internet as a Playground and Factory conference at the New School. I attended the session on Participation Literacy and Digital Labor in which Howard and Smart Mobber Paul Hartzog were panelists, and where I took the above picture. It shows Howard (l) and Dave Parry (r), an Emerging Media Professor at UT Dallas who is known on Twitter as academicdave.

The session lasted almost three hours, without a break. In what was equipped as an uber tech classroom, nonetheless the chairs were bolted to the floor in class-faces-teacher pattern. Howard battled against this paralysis by describing it and moving within the room. At the beginning, the audience was told not to expect to use the full time, yet the size crowd and the networking of ideas built until the discussion was finally called to a halt in overtime.

It seems to me two phenomena were at work here. First, people really do greatly enjoy and benefit from discourse with human beings in person, and at least in some ways more so than virtually. Second, the subject matter of this session is emergent, developing, and down right fascinating to think about and discuss. When conference proceedings are available, we will put a link to them on SmartMobs.

“Mr. Hu Jintao, Tear Down the Great Firewall!” from China Digital Times on Vimeo.

China Digital Times reports on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall. The CDT report includes the above video, and begins:

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, KulturProjekte Berlin set up a virtual “Berlin Twitter Wall” where individuals could post their thoughts on the occasion through use of a Twitter hashtag #FOTW. The site’s introduction further invites participants to “let us know which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place!” Chinese netizens have made their voices heard on this last point, and Chinese comments bashing the Great Firewall and Internet censorship now dominate the site.

Observers are talking about the Iranian uprisings of 2009 in smartmobbing terms. Here is part of such an analysis by Michael Ledeen:

Several thoughtful people have commented on an unusual element in the Iranian revolutionary movement, aka “The Green Path of Hope.”  Although there is a troika (Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami) that inspires many of the movement’s participants, there seems to be a lack of top-down leadership.  Indeed, Mousavi has been at pains to say that the people are the true leaders, that he is not creating a political movement but a “social network,” and that the strength of the Green Path derives from the spontaneous and creative actions of millions of Iranians.

It sounds a lot like the thesis put forward in the recent book, The Starfish and the Spider, which argues that top-down organizations are less successful than those that give maximum freedom to their people.  If you decapitate a spider, it dies, but if you lop off an arm of a starfish, it regenerates.  In like manner, despite a massive crackdown from the Iranian regime–thousands of arrests (now termed “kidnappings” by Iranian Tweeters), scores of executions, mass rape and other forms of torture, show trials and stern intimidation from political and military leaders, judges and clerics, the Green Path moves on, with its next publicly announced challenge to the regime set for December 7th.  Meanwhile, demonstrations and strikes continue across the country. . . .